The Wilderness
Prologue: You reap what you sow
Prologue: You reap what you sow
The early 2010s were a time of great confusion in the political world. Many had written off the Republican party as doomed to a great amount of time in the Wilderness after the abject failure of the Bush Administration had driven the country off a cliff and led the Republicans to their worst result since Barry Goldwater. Yet all this doom had failed to come to pass. In January of 2010 Scott Brown would shock the nation by becoming the first Republican to be elected at the federal level in Massachusetts since 1994, and the first senator since 1972.
Brown’s election was a clear sign of who had the wind at their back heading into the 2010 midterm elections. Riding a wave of populist resentment and economic malaise, the once-libertarian Tea party movement was now threatening to take over the nation. Huge protests against the perceived excesses of the federal government were held across America. Even in notionally liberal states like California the size and scale of the protests were a sight to behold. Candidates once considered unelectable geared up for a mighty battle against a weakened establishment.
Across America Democrats would rapidly start to close ranks around their own incumbents, especially in the Rust Belt where formerly loyal democrats, likely motivated by a feeling of insecurity about their future, fears about rising government control over their lives, and privately held, unreconstructed views on race sparked into the open by the election of the first non-white President. In this, democrats were at least marginally more effective than Republicans, who even as they shot into the lead in polls across the nation saw incumbent after incumbent fall in primaries by the radical new faction.
The first glimmers of hope for Democrats would emerge early in the primary season, tiny pinpricks of light sputtering to life in an endless sea of dark, negative press. Evan Bayh announced that he would recontest his senate seat, heavily threatened by the Tea party, while Bill Halter was able to unseat Blanche Lincoln (the most vulnerable senator who had intended to run for re-election).
These on their own were not huge game changers, but the insurgent tea party would also take huge scalps in the Republican primaries. Grandfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain would finish the job he’d started six years earlier and scalp Johnny Isakson, while in Indiana Martin Stutzmann would do the same to Dan Coats. Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, Pat Toomey, and Clint Didier were all similarly riding the coat-tails of the base’s revulsion to ever greater heights.
Democratic strategists hoped to exploit these fissures within the Republican party between their own establishment and the Tea Partiers, and in this they were greatly helped by the proliferation of new, radical right outlets, late-arriving answers to Bush-era liberal websites like Daily Kos such as Redstate and Breitbart flocked to even the faintest whiff of establishment scandal, trying to build up every single whiff of smoke into a roaring bushfire ready to burn down the much-reviled establishment, no matter how furiously they had to pump the bellows to do so.
In the dark halls of power, the DNC’s operatives were hard at work trying to effectively reverse engineer an infamous republican strategy for elections, and again found themselves making unlikely allies. In states where the Establishment Republican had triumphed like New York’s special election, lingering tea party resentment and conservative parties with third party ballot access were gearing up for challenges. As the GOP had done with the Green (Getting Republicans Elected Every November) party, now a new, vicious faction of aspiring Democratic strategists, inspired by the notorious Lee Atwater, worked their dark magic.
In this they found a ready ally in Steven K. Bannon, a former investment banker turned Conservative activist (Described as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement by one democratic operative, and ‘a raging asshole of pure darkness’ by a republican colleague) would work to secure financing and distribution for a huge number of activist films, while also signal-boosting Tea Party challengers via the news site he had co-founded, Breitbart News. A name that would live on in infamy amongst the ‘professional’ Conservative campaign staffer sphere for almost as long as Bannon himself would.
The GOP had sown the field with the seeds of the Tea Party movement, cultivated it, nurtured it, and sought to gain greatly from the fruits of their labour. As the campaign entered its final months, they would find themselves bitterly disappointed. Races that had once seemed winnable in a good year were written off as Tea party favourites sputtered out amid accusations of everything from participating in Nazi re-enactments, to Witchcraft, to the far more traditional sexual assault. Even in races that had seemed less longshot than Ohio’s 9th, or Delaware’s senate race, they found themselves under threat.
Rand Paul’s heterodox views on things like national security had left him open for an unexpected assault from the right and as democratic dark money poured into the race his fifteen point lead tightened over the summer to just five. In Indiana, Evan Bayh fought for his political life and made great hay out of his opponent’s belief in a total abortion ban, a political position that was radical even for Indiana. “Women can’t trust Stutzman” became a common attack line, and while many republicans would complain about the horrendously negative tone of the race these bitter attacks would start to slowly wrench the needle back towards democrats.
Then came the game changer. A CIA Operation Station in Pakistan had scored what amounted to a coup de grace when documents related to the location of Osama Bin Laden’s compound were recovered during the second battle of Swat. The revelation he had been hiding in Abbotabad were immediately passed on to the Agency from several assets within the nation. Before Bin Laden had a chance to relocate a hastily put together operation was launched, and on October 3rd, 2010, President Obama would go before the nation to declare that the man responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States had been killed in a Special Forces raid.
After almost a decade mired in a war with no clear way out, the death of the man many blamed (alongside Bush) for trapping America in this foreign nightmare, would cause something like a national catharsis. Unity not seen since the terror attacks in 2001 overtook the nation and for a brief moment America was one nation united in celebration again. While the good vibes would not last into the New Year, democrats jumped as many as seven points nationally.
Suddenly races that even with candidates that had turned out to be duds like in Kentucky or Indiana, that the RNC had believed the right-wing tilt of the state would allow them to overcome, became extremely competitive. Republican Megadonors, who had been previously extremely generous, suddenly began to get cold feet. While some claimed they did not want to appear unpatriotic and to tarnish this great moment, in reality many of them had simply given up. The Republican party had come off two miserable political cycles, 2006 and 2008 had been brutal and effectively wiped out the Republican front bench. Flashbacks to these defeats paralysed donors at a critical moment, and this seven point bounce grew even higher as Democratic donors felt buoyed by a moment of intense, patriotic pride and opened up the floodgates.
Despite the scale of the October Surprise that the Obama Administration had pulled off, it was not enough to totally eclipse the rising tide of populist anger at the administration. In the house races, both at the federal and state level, Democrats would suffer their worst defeats, losing 30 seats in the House of Representatives and slightly over 250 state seats nationwide.
Results in the senate, however, were dramatically different. Rand Paul, who some democratic strategists had early on identified as a potential weak link, cost Republicans his senate seat in Kentucky, a shocking pick up for Democrats. Many seats Republicans had been hopeful about would leave the party coming up woefully short. In Indiana Evan Bayh would triumph, joined by Russ Feingold in Wisconsin, both securing victory by barely over a percentage point each. Ultimately Republicans would only pick up two seats, North Dakota, a seat that had been long-considered safe given the overwhelming popularity of John Hooeven, and Arkansas, which they barely scraped over the line in. It was a humiliating result for the RNSC, and heads would roll.
The final third set of America-wide elections, for State Governorships, would be similarly messy for the RNC. Several shock upsets would see the party snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, something that, several Megadonors groused, they had an increasing habit of doing. While the party would make inroads across the Midwest, either capturing states outright (Notable prizes including Wisconsin, which they narrowly took despite Ron Johnson flaming out, Nevada, where they knocked off the Senate Majority Leader’s son, and Pennsylvania, where despite a late surge Tom Cobbett would hold onto his lead.) or making shocking inroads into previously strongly democratic territory, coming within half a point of felling Ted Strickland in Ohio (Strickland had won with more than 60% of the vote just four years earlier), in the south there were now serious signs of backsliding. Mark Sanford would depart South Carolina under a cloud of scandal and deliver his state narrowly into the hands of Vincent Shaheen, a democrat, Roy Barnes would have his revenge on Sonny Perdue in Georgia, and Rick Scott would see himself lose by a razor-thin margin even as Marco Rubio secured a comfortable election over divided opposition. Independents would take two states off of the major parties, and Republicans would find themselves licking their wounds and trying to figure out what, exactly, had gone so badly wrong.
2010 Midterm Totals
Senate:
Dem 55 - Rep 43 - Ind 2
Republican net gain 1 seat
Seats changing hands:
Kentucky - Jack Conway def. Rand Paul. Democratic gain.
North Dakota - John Hooven def. Tracy Potter. Republican Gain
Arkansas - John Boozman def. Bill Halter. Republican Gain
House:
Dem 222 - Rep 213
Republicans gain 30 seats.
Democrats retain control.
Gubernatorial:
Rep 26 - Dem 26 - Ind 2
POD: A stronger tea party movement, married to a more competent DNC, with the assassination of Bin Laden, sets the stage for a much wilder 2012 primary with a much weakened Republican establishment trying to keep the insurgent tides under control. Can they succeed? Tune in next time, for Chapter 1: It’s a long way to the bottom.
